Obama elaborates on preferences, race

In 1990, as his fellow students protested the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action.

Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand. He said he had "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action" in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

"The success of the program speaks for itself," he said of the law review's affirmative-action policy in a letter published in the school's student newspaper.

He has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it "absolutely necessary" when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the U.S. Senate. But in his Democratic presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

During a debate in April, Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, "who have had a pretty good deal" in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.

"We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more," Obama said last week in Chicago.

Potential bridge

While Obama's biracial background in many ways makes him an ideal bridge between racial sensibilities, the issue remains politically treacherous. Obama's comments have begun resonating in the long-running dispute over affirmative action, emerging as three states consider ballot initiatives that would ban racial preferences.

"We have to have these conversations about race and class," said John Payton, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Payton disagreed with Obama's stance on his daughters but said his comments would lead to a thoughtful national discussion.

In some respects, Obama's remarks reflect a growing consensus that class should play a significant role in affirmative-action programs. It does in states such as California and Michigan, where voters have decided that race can no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions.

A Supreme Court decision last year concerning Seattle Public Schools and a district in Kentucky barred districts from assigning students to schools based on their race, has also forced administrators to focus on socioeconomic status in efforts to integrate segregated public schools.

But the Supreme Court has also said universities could consider race as they worked to diversify their campuses. Proponents of such programs point out that blacks continue to face discrimination, regardless of class or income. Some fear that Obama's focus on the socioeconomic status of his daughters — as opposed to the diversity of experience and perspective they might bring to predominantly white campuses — may help conservatives eliminate race from university admissions and government hiring.

Affirmative-action foe

Ward Connerly, an opponent of affirmative action, said he believed Obama's remarks would buoy support for his ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska in November that would ban preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity and sex in government hiring and public education.

Last week, Sen. John McCain, Obama's Republican rival, announced his support for those measures.

Obama opposes the ballot initiatives, saying they would derail efforts to break down barriers for women and minorities. But Connerly said Obama had helped the cause. "He's advanced the debate," Connerly said. "He's brought it to a new level."

Some of Obama's supporters said they thought he was emphasizing class in a bid to woo white voters, who typically favor preferences that benefit the poor, surveys show.

But friends and former classmates disputed that, saying his evolving views reflect years of wrestling with the issue as a matter of policy and in his own life.

In the past few years, Obama has voiced sympathy for whites who feel resentful of race-based affirmative action and questioned how long such programs need to continue.

Even as he argued that time-tables for minority hiring may be necessary where there is evidence of systemic discrimination, he also warned in his second book, "The Audacity of Hope," that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America."

It was 2006 then, and Obama was a wealthy senator considering a bid for the presidency. He worried that race-based preferences, while necessary, might undermine efforts at building cross-racial coalitions.

Presaging his recent focus on class, Obama argued that whites were more likely to join blacks in supporting programs that were not racially based.

"An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific programs isn't just good policy," Obama said in his book. "It's good politics."